


going to catch you

by whatever_forever



Category: BioShock
Genre: M/M, why did I write this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 12:04:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7360720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatever_forever/pseuds/whatever_forever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>pre descent into madness au where Jack is Dr Steinman's assistant who's kinda feelin the whole revolution thing and atlas is there, they're into each other, things happen. cw for the bl makeouts. it is safe 2 assume that atlas is not fontaine. when have i ever</p>
            </blockquote>





	going to catch you

**Author's Note:**

> no sexing yet but yknow. all good things come w patience. ill change the rating to explicit once somebody pulls a dick out or smthn

Jack had been all around Rapture. He had grown up staring out glass windows and into the softly glowing abyss of the deep. It was, if anything, a comfort to be buried so deep into the ocean. He would wave hello, and the abyss would wave back.  
He decided as he slogged his way into work one morning that the Medical Pavilion was by far the worst part of the whole city. He stopped by the front desk, dreading the climb up to the top floor. He knew that Steinman had a thing for asymmetry, but he was certain one of his legs would come off if those curving stairs got any steeper.  
“Hello, Jack,” said the secretary, not taking her eyes off her paperwork. She was kind and young, but Jack could never remember her name.  
“Hello, just clocking in,” he replied, straightening out his ill-fitting labcoat.  
“Wait a moment,” she held up a finger and glanced at him. “Dr. Steinman told me something this morning about wanting to see you. ‘As soon as possible,’ he said.”  
Jack froze. Dr. Steinman was arguably the worst person in Rapture, he decided. At least in the top five.  
‘Uh, alright,” he said. “Is he still in the surgical wing?”  
The secretary nodded. Jack let the pit in his stomach eat away at the rest of him.

Jack made it to the top of the staircase, limbs intact. The pin-up girls on the wall were printed on the backs of his eyelids. Their cheeks had a rosiness you could feel in your gut, he thought. And what a bad feeling it was.  
He passed the clerk at the cash register and waved hello. He didn’t wave back. A line of people dressed in sultry colors waited in front of the counter.  
Jack couldn’t remember his name, either. He resolved to just keep staring out the window. The black water outside was gushing around, mixed up by the sea life. In that way, the abyss was friendlier than some people.  
He had reached the entrance to the surgical wing. A blast of cold air shot over his skin the moment the airlock had come up. He drew the flimsy coat tighter around his shoulders. His steps echoed in the hall.  
“Is that him?” came a hushed whisper. “Jack, is that you?” Steinman was shouted from the next room over.  
Jack held his breath. “Yes, sir,” he called back.  
“Oh, thank god!” the surgeon croaked. “What took so long?”  
Jack slipped through the door and entered the wing. Dr. Steinman was hunched over his surgical table. A thin young woman, sedated and held in place by a leather strap, laid in front of him.  
“I thought I was on time, sir,” Jack said quietly. His brown hair was falling in front of his eyes. He brushed it aside and took a pair of gloves from the drawer.  
“No, you won’t be needing those,” Steinman snapped, waving his syringe in the air like a baton. “I’ve just sedated her, I won’t be needing you, that‘s not why I called you here- just turn on that light, would you?”  
Even if he hadn’t been standing over another human being with a large needle, Steinman would still have been terrifying. The man’s mouth was covered by his surgical mask, leaving only his beady, watering eyes. Jack tried hard to keep his own trained on the floor.  
“Scalpel,” ordered Steinman. Jack handed him the knife.  
“A facelift,” the doctor said. “Should only be a moment.”  
Thirty minutes passed painfully slowly while Jack stared at his shoes and thought simultaneously about hating his job and how lucky he had been to have gotten one at all, occasionally handing over and taking away various sharp objects until Steinman declared the young woman a finished product. He left her lying on the table. Her eyelids fluttered.  
“Right,” Steinman said. “Come with me.”  
He lead Jack back down the hall and into a room off to the right. A desk and table sat in the center of the floor. A security camera stared them down.  
“Pesky things,” Steinman muttered. “I daresay old Andrew Ryan’s going a bit paranoid on us all, hmm?”  
Jack didn’t know how to respond. He was doing his best to keep his slight frame from trembling. Dr. Steinman began to rifle around in the desk, sifting through stacks of photographs and paperwork.  
“Funny thing happened the other day,” he continued. “Mr. Ryan asked me to keep an eye on you.”  
That took Jack by surprise. “What?” he asked, half a question and half a gasp for air.  
Steinman chuckled. “Oh, yes. He said you’ve got some obvious talents, a good amount of potential, but he’d seen you in Neptune’s Bounty the other day with one of Atlas’s.”  
Jack stared at him, wide-eyed. “I-I didn’t-”  
“Spare me,” Steinman waved him away. “Do you want to know a secret, Jack?”  
“Sir?” Jack spluttered, trying his damndest not to cough up bile.  
“I like you, too,” he murmured. “I’ve also seen your potential. I think I’ve got something to keep you busy with, so you don’t go looking for anymore, ah, trouble.”  
Jack didn’t understand. The only time he’d been in Neptune’s Bounty was when he had gone to buy a few cans of tuna from Peach Wilkins, who was smuggling them out of the port for himself and selling them under the table for a reduced price. His friend Anna had told him about it.  
Steinman was smoothing a photograph over the surface of the table. It was a picture of a woman’s head, facing forwards. She looked cross, with her arched eyebrows and unsmiling mouth. Dr. Steinman took out a red pen.  
“This is a good one,” he muttered. “But, can you see how she could improve?”  
He traced a red oval over her eye, followed by a dotted line that ran into her cheek.  
“You move that there,” he said. “Oh, and if only her mouth was just a bit to the left-”  
Jack watched as the doctor scribbled all over the woman’s face. As he went to intervene, Steinman turned to face him. They were nearly the same height, Jack observed. Steinman had just about a half an inch, and he looked like he was enjoying himself too much. He peeled his surgical mask away, revealing thin, twisted lips.  
“You see?” Steinman asked. “They could be so much more. I could make them beautiful, but not alone. And you-”  
Dr. Steinman ran his forefinger over Jack’s hand, which hung limply as his side. Jack took a step back.  
“You’ve got the steadiest hands I’ve ever seen,” Steinman whispered.  
“Sir, I-I couldn’t-” Jack stared, wide-eyed, at what the surgeon had asked him to do. The shock was settling, somehow. “I’ve never done a single operation-”  
“Nonsense. There’s just no time to waste, Jack, don’t you see? You’ve got to-”  
In the other room, the patient was awake.  
“Dr. Steinman?” she called, her voice coated in drowsiness. “Where are you? Dr. Steinman?”  
“Very well,” Steinman said. “Give me your answer by tomorrow, first thing again.” He started towards the door, and then stopped himself.  
“Oh, and Jack?”  
“Sir?”  
“It’s either this or you lose your job,” Steinman drawled. “I really do hate to put you out like this, but-”  
“Dr. Steinman?” chirped the patient. “I’m awake!”  
“You understand, I’m sure. You can start by organizing all those files we disrupted,” he finished. The door slammed shut. Jack was alone with the single dim lightbulb and the security camera. Jack had a sour taste in his mouth and a new, sudden pain in his hands. The abyss outside grew darker still.

Jack considered himself a triple threat: a terrible job, a terrible boss, and a terrible apartment in Apollo square. Considering he wasn’t anything of a celebrity, save the once earlier that day Andrew Ryan had apparently taken some small notice of him, he thought he had it all right. A shoebox to himself was a welcome thing, even if he slept beside his crowbar in case of intruders. He hated admitting it to himself, but he sort of liked the unrest in the streets. He’d heard a protest going on a block away while he was walking home from work, once. He had never quite forgotten the voice on that man standing up on the metro station platform. The twists he had spun into every word got stuck in Jack’s head, winding over and over again until it became impossible to remember what on earth the man had actually been saying. He blamed it on the allure of rebellion.  
The was a knock on his door. Jack reached for his crowbar.  
“Open up,” said Peach Wilkins from the other side of the door. “I got your fuckin’ tuna.”  
Jack dropped the crowbar and unbolted the door.  
Peach, a crooked standing man with a voice that always hissed, dumped the two cans onto the floor and slammed the door behind him.  
“Thanks for paying in advance,” he shouted. Jack heard heavy footsteps clunking down the hallway. Jack opened the door again. Peach was trying to slink quietly away and failing. His waders left sludge on the ground.  
“What’s the rush?” Jack called.  
“Ain’t you heard?” Peach shouted back. “Atlas is talkin’ down in the center of the square.”  
Jack whistled. “Big fan of his, huh?”  
“Who in their right mind down here ain’t?” Peach yelled. And then, he was gone.  
Jack put the tuna cans into his cabinet. A gust of cold air blew in from outside. Jack shut the door threw a sweater on over his button-up shirt.  
He couldn’t wait to see what all the hype was about.

From a distance, Jack almost mistook the gathering for a candlelight vigil. Men and women in rough fabrics and dirty faces held up bright lights in the form of blunt torches as cheers and shouts filled the air. The square was completely packed. Protesters squeezed into every open spot, bodies were shoved against the cold stone walls. Jack let the crowd compress around him. He eventually elbowed his way in close enough to see.  
The crowd was quiet. They hung on the man’s every word.  
He was tall, but Jack couldn’t imagine he was anywhere over his own height- in fact, he figured that they were probably about the same. The man’s hair was thick and dark and it hung near his eyes, just stopping at his browline. The lines in his face were clear and strong, his eyes glowing amber in the fire’s light. Jack breathed in slowly.  
“We came here in search of a better life,” he said, his voice rolling and confident, but with a gentleness and bravery that felt like feeling daylight. “But what we got was something worse. How many of you have gone nights hungry, afraid, helpless -and watched your children do the same- all because of Ryan’s ‘Great Chain?’ How many of you were promised happiness and safety down here, but instead found a night terror that we’re denied an escape from by law? It’s got to-”  
But the crowd was already roaring. Jack found himself prone to agreeing with them, copying them. He hadn’t ever had any children, or very many partners for that matter. He hadn’t a lot of childhood memories, only brief snapshots of the orphanage where he was raised -and he was glad he’d turned eighteen before it became Girls Only, that was for sure. There weren’t so many little boys around Rapture anymore, and he had to wonder why.  
Somewhere in the crowd, a man snapped his fingers and a flame lit in his thumb.  
“Death to Ryan!” the man cried. The crowd, apparently, felt very much the same.

The people in Apollo Square had a hard time dispersing. Eventually, in the heat of the riot, Atlas himself had taken his leave. Jack had been scanning the crowd for a familiar face for what had seemed like forever. He resolved to go home.  
As he walked the alleyways back to his apartment, he caught sight of a shard of broken glass in the street. The thing was the size of a cat and glinted yellow. Jack sucked in a deep breath. He had nearly stepped on it.  
“Christ,” he murmured, bending down to pick it up. “That could maim somebody.”  
“No shit,” said somebody, a few feet in front of him, a trail of blood leaking from his foot.  
“Christ!” Jack cried out, “are you alright?”  
“No,” came the reply. And Jack realized who he was talking to.  
“Christ,” said Jack.  
“No, just me,” Atlas said, smiling weakly. “I feel like a scrub for asking but- could you- ah-”  
“Yes,” Jack said, helping the man to where the light was less dim.  
“I’m guessing it sort of ruins the whole appeal,” Atlas groaned as Jack went to work removing the shards and wrapping the wounds in shards from his button-up, “knowing I was drunk off my arse the whole time.”  
“You were what?” Jack asked, dropping the piece of glass he had been holding. It shattered on the asphalt.  
“Watch yourself, boyo,” Atlas warned, flinching as the impact resounded in the street.  
“You were drunk? But that speech you gave- that was amazing,” Jack said, not really believing what was happening. Reality was distorted in this little backway that no one ever takes, he decided.  
“Repeat anything enough times and you’ll have it down pat in any case. And I’m just sayin’- what they want to hear-” he coughed, holding onto Jack’s shoulder.  
Jack lowered his eyes. “You mean you don’t really believe any of it?”  
Atlas coughed again. “What? ‘Course I do, it’s just- you would not believe the week I’ve had. Having too much to drink, this whole glass in my foot, kind ly stranger thing- lord, you don’t know the half of-”  
He stopped his ramble, a dazed look crossing his eyes. Jack wrapped the last wound.  
“There.”  
Atlas tried to stand without Jack’s support. His knees buckled. Jack panicked and caught him by the arms.  
“Where should I take you?” Jack asked, helping him back to his feet.  
“There’s a place- just down the road from here, we’ve taken it as our headquarters, can’t really miss it, big old ‘Fontaine’s Home For The Poor’ sign an’ all,” he said, looking straight into Jack’s eyes, a glossy film over his own. Jack nodded and put his arm under Atlas’s shoulder.  
“I’m sorry about all this,” Atlas slurred.  
Jack could smell the smoke and cheap whiskey on his clothes. The last light in the alley flickered out.  
“It’s alright,” Jack said. “We’ll get there.”

Jack woke up the next morning, fuzzy memories of the night before fresh in his mind. He had helped Atlas back to the square. It had been three AM by the time they’d gotten there- not a rioter in sight. Atlas found he could stand on his own again, so Jack left him to it.  
He had been lying awake for about an hour, the memory of Atlas’s skin against his own sinking deep against his skull. He felt like he was boiling over. The man’s voice wouldn’t leave his head. It followed him from the alley and into his dreams, and then all the way with him to work the next day.

 

“Have you decided?” Steinman asked. Jack rubbed his eyes. He had forgotten all about the surgeon’s offer.  
“Sir, please-” Jack started, staring blankly at the photographs Steinman held in his hands. They stood in the central room of the surgery wing. Jack was almost overcome with sleep. He barely registered anything until Steinman began to shout at him.  
“Ugly creature!” the surgeon spat, throwing the photographs down. “No matter, you’re worse off for it. Don’t think there’s anything you can go about doing in this city without someone taking notice- you either take my offer, or you answer to Ryan’s Security about what you were doing at a rally last night-”  
“Dr. Steinman,” Jack pleaded. “Please, sir, what do you mean?”  
Steinman collected himself.  
“Stupid boy,” he muttered. “Of course, such a pretty face, he’s bound to be too dull to understand. Poor, stupid boy. I wonder if he’d even know what he was-”  
“I’m still here, sir,” Jack said.  
“Yes,” Steinman said. “You are. I suppose you want to know what you’d be doing, should you take my offer?”  
“Yes, sir,” Jack said, letting out a slow breath he’d been too scared to take.  
Steinman’s face twisted into a smile.  
“Symmetry, my dear,” he said. “It’s time we do something about symmetry.”

Jack went home that night suspended in disbelief.  
“Of course, you’d only be assisting me for the first few times,” Steinman had said. “They’re very pretty girls, you know. Can you believe Mr. Cohen caught such a bunch? And stealing from vending machines, no less!”  
Jack was making himself ill by doing nothing. He decided to get shitfaced and wonder what he’d done to himself in the morning.  
Jack wasn’t quite a bar frequenter, but he was fond of an old haunt in Neptune’s Bounty that he’d pay the occasional visit to in desperate times. The Fighting McDonagh was popular among Rapture’s blue collars, so it never quite felt like drinking alone.  
As the airlock rolled up, Jack felt his stomach shrivel up and plunge down like a rock into the ocean. He wanted to quit his job and never have to look at Steinman’s grotesque face again. He was well aware of how many people found him handsome. It made him want to vomit.  
He sat down at the bar and ordered a cheap whiskey. He knew exactly what had influenced him.  
Speak of the devil.  
Jack twisted his neck around, not believing what he had heard. Reality might be a bit warped in the Fighting McDonagh as well. Atlas sat at a table with two other men Jack didn’t recognize. They were as built as he was.  
Jack turned back around and thanked the bartender for his drink. He took a long sip.  
“Alcohol is the only liquid that dehydrates you,” he remembered Steinman saying. “Which should tell you that there’s something wrong with having too much. Goddamn these stupid pigs, destroying their lives with it.” He had been working on reconstructive surgery for a man who had his face badly injured in a barfight.  
Jack thought him sort of hypocritical. The man was using more and more of those strange new drugs in his work now. Jack just couldn’t remember what it was called-  
“And what might your name be, darling?”  
A woman had placed her hands gently on Jack’s shoulder. She wore a sparkling gold gown that fell to her ankles, a slit up one thigh, her blonde hair plaited around her head. She had a kindly face that was covered in a light coat of makeup. She smiled down at him.  
“Jack Wynand,” he stuttered. “Uh-”  
“Well Jack, you should make sure to come down to Fort Frolic sometime this weekend. Tickets to ‘Happy Chappy’ are on sale for the forty eight hour period only,” she said, drawing her hands away and shimmering away to the next person over. Jack widened his eyes and took another sip.  
Jack looked back at Atlas’s table. The two men were getting up to leave. Atlas wasn’t anywhere in sight.  
Shouts erupted from the other end of the bar. A small crowd was forming. Jack got out of his seat and stumbled over.  
“You can’t’ touch her!” shouted a gangly man in a suit. “She’s here on Fort Frolic business, get away-”  
“She came up to me,” slurred a man Jack couldn’t see and didn’t want to. His voice was gravelly. “Gettin’ awful nice with me, too.”  
“Stop,” ordered the bartender. “Take this outside or drop it.” She put herself between the woman and the two men. The man with the gravelly voice lurched at the woman in the gold dress, his hands covered in electricity. Jack had seen it before. He stood, unable to move fast enough, to do anything of any use to anyone.  
The man raised his hand in the air. There were screams and people jeering, except for the woman, who promptly took off her shoe and hit him over the head with it.  
The man’s eyes glazed over. He was covered in blue and silver lines that ran over his body as if they were alive. He convulsed and fell unconscious.  
The whole bar was quiet. Murmurs spread through the quickly dispersing crowd. There were whistles and chatter. The gangly man tried to walk her out, but she insisted on staying. The woman took a seat at the bar next to Jack and ordered her a drink.  
“Since no one else is saying it,” Jack mumbled, “that was incredible.”  
The woman looked at him, scanning his face. He tried to smile, but that felt wrong.  
“I’m used to it, Jack,” she said. “A girl in my line of work-” she stopped herself. “Well, you know.”  
“I don’t,” Jack admitted. “I haven’t ever- what’s your name, did you say?”  
The two of them were feeling equally as embarrassed by that point, and it served as a common interest.  
“Jasmine,” the woman said. “Jasmine Jolene. And how old are you, did you say?”  
“Twenty four,” Jack answered truthfully.  
Jasmine studied him. “You look younger, son,” she said.  
“I get that,” Jack replied. “I get it a lot.”  
“I wouldn’t put you a day over eighteen,” she continued. “I’ve never seen you around, what do you do?”  
Jack winced inwardly. “I’m, uh, a medical assistant.”  
Jasmine raised a dark eyebrow. “You work with Steinman?”  
“Yes,” Jack answered.  
“A girl I know got her face done with him. And he did a bang-up job, but she said he kept muttering something about Pablo Picasso to himself,something about different shapes, she said he was giving her quite the scare.”  
Jack sighed. “You don’t know the half of it.”  
There he was again. Coming up in Jack’s very words now.  
Jasmine laughed. “I can only imagine, son.”  
She ruffled Jack’s hair. He smiled, and it didn’t feel wrong that time.  
“What’s a kid like you doing here anyway, Jack?”  
“Drowning my sorrows, same as everybody.”  
“Alright. Just promise me you’re getting home safe.”  
“Yeah, of course. Only a Bathysphere ride away.”  
Jasmine patted his shoulder, got up and left. Jack was alone again. It was getting late and he knew it. His head was spinning. Was time even real in Rapture? Nobody knew, nobody could see the sun-  
He was stopped on his way out the door by his the first of his two newfound friends.  
“Fancy seein’ you here,” Atlas called over, turning Jack around.  
Jack closed the distance and tried to act like he hadn’t been looking for him the entire time.  
“Oh, hello.”  
“I never got to say thanks,” Atlas said, clapping a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “For last night, you know.”  
“Thanks, but I can’t, I’ve got to-”  
“I wasn’t offering you a drink, boyo.”  
Jack narrowed his eyes. “What, then?”  
“Come with me,” Atlas said, tugging on Jack’s sweater. “Hey, do you ever change out of that thing?”  
Jack turned red. He let Atlas lead him out of the bar.  
“Where are we-”  
Atlas pressed him up against the wall outside the bar and kissed him. He folded Jack’s hands into his own.  
Jack immediately pulled away. “Christ, you’re drunk again.”  
Atlas’s face fell. “I’m not.”  
“Then why-”  
“Oh, lord. I’m sorry, this is bad, this is really-”  
Jack furrowed his brow. Atlas sighed.  
“I don’t know. I’m sorry, I haven’t been able to stop saying ‘Christ!’ at everything since I heard you saying it so much, I keep thinkin’ about-”  
Jack leaned up and kissed him back. He let Atlas press him back down.  
“I’m sorry- the way you were looking at me- I just thought-”  
“It’s okay,” Jack said, parting his lips again. “That was definitely intentional. We should go somewhere private before we get caught, though.”  
“My place or yours?”  
Jack wrinkled his nose. “Mine smells like tuna. Your friend Peach is a scoundrel. He gave me the stinkiest tuna on purpose, I know it.”  
“He what?”  
“Your place.”  
Atlas scratched his head. “There’s a whole lot of other people currently planning a raid there.”  
“Why’d you even ask, then?” Jack grumbled.

Jack’s bed wasn’t big enough for the both of them. They had to stick to the wall. They learned a hell of a lot about each other that way.  
“What’s your name?” Atlas asked. “And sorry I was too drunk last night to ask.”  
“Jack.”  
“What’d you do for a living?”  
“I’m Dr. Steinman’s assistant.”  
Atlas stopped and took his hands off of Jack’s back.  
“Is something wrong?” Jack asked, staring up at Atlas’s worried face.  
“Man’s a lunatic, boyo,” Atlas said. “Everyone knows it. Are you alright?”  
Jack tried to answer for a moment and stopped. He had been going to say that everything was fine.  
“No,” he said. “He keeps asking me to do something for him, and I’m not sure I can.”  
Atlas sank down against the wall. Jack sat next to him, his breathing slower.  
“Tell me, please,” Atlas said, the single lightbulb casting shadows down the lower points on his face.  
“He wants me to help him reconstruct people so that they’re- different,” Jack said. “I can’t explain how. He talks about moving eyes into cheeks, or changing a person’s mouth so they smile all lopsided- but I don’t think he really means it,” Jack said.  
“Oh,” Atlas said. “That is a kicker.”  
Jack found himself leaning his head into Atlas’s shoulder.  
“Why are you here?” he whispered, staring at the ceiling.  
Atlas frowned. “What?”  
“You’re a hero, Atlas.”  
“I’m not-”  
“You are, goddamn,” Jack breathed slowly, turning to face him. “Could you just-”  
“Mmm?”  
“Touch me, again,” Jack whispered. Then, as an afterthought: “I’m sorry.”  
“Don’t be,” Atlas said. He slid his hands up Jack’s back and ran his fingertips over his shoulder blades.  
Jack got up slowly. “Come on,” he said. “Cram in with me.”  
They fell asleep against each other in the too-small bed. Jack thanked his lucky stars that he didn’t have work the next day.

They woke up both half on the floor and with Jack hogging the blanket.  
“I didn’t mean to,” Jack said as they both got up. “I did it in my sleep.”  
Atlas laughed and pressed a sleepy kiss to his forehead. He pulled Jack closer and they stood like that for what seemed like forever.


End file.
